“Never.” I said it quietly, through clenched teeth, to keep myself from yelling at her. What did she know? It was her first time on the Spook Squad…er, PsyCop Unit.
She flipped open her notepad, rested it against the steering wheel and scanned it. “There’s gotta be a reason, then. Something unique to this case. We just need to figure out what it is.”
My cell phone rang. I pulled it from my coat pocket and flipped it open. “Bayne.”
“Gutierrez with you?” Warwick asked.
I refrained from asking him where the fuck else he thought my partner would be in the midst of an investigation. “Yeah.”
“Get back to the station. Both of you.” He hung up on me before I could try to figure out if he knew that the victim was giving me the silent treatment. What if one of the techs had overheard me talking to Gutierrez and had called him to tell him that I was a waste of taxpayer dollars? No, that was stupid. They had no idea how easy talking to dead victims usually was for me. They didn’t know the silence was freaking me out.
If Gutierrez had any smarmy platitudes to offer on the way back to the squad house, she kept them to herself. The GPS unit beeped every now and then and styrofoam squeaked under my heels, but at least my performance anxiety wasn’t exacerbated by a bunch of meaningless comforting phrases.
We went straight to Warwick’s office. He motioned for me to shut the door behind us. “Interesting report came through from Albuquerque today,” he said.
Albuquerque? Gutierrez was from Albuquerque. I thought that was a pretty odd coincidence until I realized the whole face-to-face could very well be about her, and not me.
“Test results,” he said, spreading the pages of a gray, degraded fax in front of us. “Did you know that your scores were identical on every psy-test you took, Lisa? Different tests, different days, and on each and every one you hit the exact score of random probability. To the percent?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but isn’t that a good thing for a Stiff?”
“Stiffs vary,” Warwick said, and I noted that a red flush had broken out across his formidable neck. “Usually between six and thirteen percent. This,” he said, gesturing at the fax, “this is not random.”
Gutierrez had ability? That probably explained what I’d seen in her right away that set me at ease. Normally I’d be happy to hear it, if she were my dry cleaner or my bridge partner. But certifiable psychics weren’t allowed on the force without spending half a year training at Camp Hell. Otherwise known as Heliotrope Station, to those who’ve never done time there.
“You’re off the case,” Warwick said. “In fact, you’re off active duty until I can figure out what to do with you.”
Gutierrez’ face was a bland mask as she handed over her badge and gun. She hadn’t said anything to defend herself. And she hadn’t denied her ability, either. She turned and walked out without a word.
“Where are you with this case?” Warwick said to me. His voice seemed normal, but his color was way too high.
“We, um.” I missed Gutierrez already. “The victim.” I shrugged. “It’s a tough one.”
“I’ll assign a pair of uniformed cops to back you up. Broaden your contact area and see what you can find.”
Great. I’d have a pair of superstitious flatfoots following me around as I went from the cemetery to the victim’s childhood home to anywhere else he liked to hang out while he’d been alive. I wondered if he had a favorite bar and, if so, the chances of eluding my babysitters and getting lucky. Ideally with Detective Marks, who’d just so happen to be there. Not that he hung out in gay bars or anything. At least, that’s what I assumed, though I didn’t hang out in gay bars either, so I didn’t actually know for sure.
Warwick turned back to his notes and picked up the phone. I was dismissed.He’d call me when he had someone lined up. I could go to my desk and start trying to make sense in writing of what was going on, but writing had never been my strong point. Even Maurice, with his two-fingered, misspelled typing, was Shakespeare next to me.
I went out to my car with the intention of grabbing a very late lunch when I saw there was someone sitting in my drivers’ seat. Since Gutierrez still had my keys, I realized that was a good thing.
“Wow,” I said as I got in. “That was….” The fact that she’d been crying stopped me dead in my tracks. I can’t stand it when girls cry.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “I earned this job.”
I tried to recall a time in my life where I would’ve gotten as worked up as she was over a job, and failed. But that’s just me. And then I had to remind myself that she’d needed to beat out a thousand other applicants to get it, and I could empathize at least a little.
“For what it’s worth, I like working with you.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. Her eyes, nose and lips were all red and puffy.
“What if I want to be a Stiff?” she said. “I make a better Stiff than a psychic. I’m a good cop. Really good.”
“You got pretty far without being found out,” I said. “Give yourself some credit for that.” I realized that was a pretty stupid thing to say, since now that she’d been discovered, her career with the force was likely over.
She just hunched and looked down, getting tears on my steering wheel.
“Maybe they’d pay to retrain you. Your abilities might be bigger than you know.”
“You saying I should try for Camp Hell?”
Oh. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a woman there. It was hard enough being myself there.
“Look,” I said, desperately trying to change the subject. “We shouldn’t be sitting here like this in front of the station. Let’s go to Dairy Queen. I’ll buy you a milkshake.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “You’re gonna get called back in any time now. I’ll just go home and try to figure out what I’m doing next.” She pulled away from the curb into the lazy, midday traffic.
“Too bad I’m not precognizant,” I said. “I’d try to give you some advice.”
She smiled at that just a little, her eyes fixed on the road. “Your dead people got any ideas for me?”
I looked out over Montrose. “There’s this fat Korean guy, hit by a bus, who’s always hanging around the intersection at Damen. But I dunno that you want to follow his advice.”
Gutierrez had picked a place in an old brick hotel less than a mile from the station. It’d been converted into studio apartments thirty years prior. The old lettering had been taken down long ago, but they’d left behind pale impressions on the brick that still read “Parker Inn.”
My phone rang just as we got out of the car. She tossed me the keys over the hood and I had to juggle a little to grab them while I tried to flip my phone open. “Bayne.”
“Get back to the station.”
“Okay…?”
“There’s been another murder.”
Chapter 5
The vinyl miniblinds on Warwirck’s door were tilted open and I could see him at his desk with his fingers steepled in front of his face as I approached. I opened his door and staggered back to avoid plowing into Jacob Marks, who’d been lurking to one side of the doorframe. I noted belatedly that his partner, Carolyn, sat on the other side of Warwick’s desk with her hands folded on her lap. She was a neat, small blonde and her skirt suit fit a lot better than Gutierrez’.
“Got a call from the Police Commissioner,” said Warwick, “and it seems we’re gonna try something a little different.” He said the word “different” like some people say “colored,” or “alternative lifestyle.”
“Detective Marks,” Jacob said, sticking out his hand to shake mine. I took his hand in a daze and let him jerk my arm up and down. It was smart of him to pretend he didn’t know me, I realized. And I supposed I looked blank enough to pull off his little act. “This is my partner, Carolyn Brinkman.” Carolyn nodded. I stammered my name, wondering if she would notice that, technically, Jacob was lying to her. But maybe he wasn’t. After a
ll, her name was Carolyn Brinkman.
Warwick piped up. “Now I know that all of your training—years of training—says that a Psych and a Stiff are like salt and pepper, yin and yang, or whatever metaphysical bullshit you want to call it.”
Ham and eggs, my brain said. Ernie and Bert. Shit and shinola. My brain could just go on and on for days. Apparently, it was panicking. Not enough to miss the fact that Marks looked like some kind of Italian supermodel in his suit. But enough to spew out random words that I had to struggle to keep from saying aloud.
“But the Commissioner don’t give a damn what all your gurus and your mental masters say about the PsyCop pairbond. See, he don’t work with PsyCops, not directly. He’s old school. And if it were up to him, crimes would get solved with sweat and brains and elbow grease and luck.”
“And maybe a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the latest crime database technology,” Marks added smoothly.
Warwick made a little barking sound, and I realized that it was a laugh.
I’d never made him laugh.
“But the Commissioner says we gotta do something,” said Warwick, “and unless it puts one of my men at risk, we do it.”
I looked at Carolyn with her hands folded on her knee, and at Marks, who may or may not have had a secret smile playing over his expression.
“He wants us to team up?” I asked. I’d almost used the analogy of a three-way, but considering that I’d had a literal petting session with Marks, I thought better of it.
“Exactly.”
Marks pulled a leatherbound notepad from his inside pocket and flipped it open. “The case does straddle both of our jurisdictions.”
“The second victim…?” I asked.
“Anal penetration and mirrors,” said Warwick. “Happened two nights prior to Blakewood, according the techs. You’ll need to work out some kind of game plan to work the scene without stepping on each others’ toes.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” said Marks. “Carolyn and I would interview the victims ourselves, but our victims are usually alive. Seems natural for Detective Bayne to assume that duty. We’ll handle the witnesses.”
Warwick scribbled an address on a sticky note and handed it to me. The homicide was indeed on the border of the Twelfth and Fifth Precincts. It was as if the perp had specifically chosen the very method and location that would bring Marks and me back together in a sea of fumbling awkwardness.
“I’ll meet you there,” I said quickly, and snatched the note from Warwick’s hand. I’d rather fly solo than ride along with Marks in the back seat of his car like a third wheel while prim little Carolyn sat up front and continually adjusted the air conditioning.
I arrived to see Marks parallel parking his Crown Victoria with stunning accuracy in a space adjacent to the scene. I found a spot a block away in front of a hydrant, slapped my police permit atop my dashboard and started jogging toward the duplex.
And since when did I ever walk any more quickly than was absolutely necessary? I slowed my pace as I felt the prickle of sweat in my armpits.
Marks was talking to the uniformed officers on the scene. Carolyn turned to face me. “Sergeant Warwick wasn’t very clear about what happened to your new partner.”
My initial impulse was to make something up about Gutierrez, help her save a little face. And then I remembered that I was talking to the human polygraph. “Turns out she has some ability.”
“That’s too bad. It would be better to keep our numbers even.” She tugged her impeccable suit jacket down, though it hadn’t needed straightening. “Next thing you know they’ll be giving Psychs double duty, trying to spread us over two or three NPs.” I hadn’t heard that old term for Stiffs—NPs, or Non-Psychics—in ages. I guess it was more respectful, but still. I had to quell a smirk.
“But our ratio’s tipped the other way,” I pointed out. “Two Psychs to a Stiff.”
“The brass won’t look at it that way,” she said. “Wait and see.”
The thought of being told to do more work didn’t worry me much. Overtime was fine by me. And when I felt overwhelmed, I’d just stand around and zone out, and everyone would assume I was talking to dead people. I think Maurice’d had his own way of doing the same thing. Sometimes I found pages and pages from his notepads covered in loop-de-loops.
Marks turned toward us and gave a little come-hither nod. I let Carolyn go first with the intention of tagging along behind the two of them, but Marks hung back so that he and I were side by side. “Sink or swim,” he said.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” I said, trading a maxim for a maxim.
Marks stopped in front of the victim’s outer door and faced me. “Do you need anything from me in there that I should know about? With Carolyn,” he said, gesturing toward her, “I’m the muscle. The people we’re interviewing don’t get inside her personal space unless she wants them to. But you?” He shrugged, and his crisp suit rode up and down on his broad shoulders. “I don’t know what you need.”
I needed Maurice, was what I needed. I struggled to articulate what, exactly, he’d done for me. He was solid. He didn’t judge me. He believed me.
Maybe that was really it. He believed that when I mumbled to myself, someone replied, and that when I stared really hard, there was something there, even if he couldn’t see it himself.
“General backup is fine,” I said.
Marks gave me a withering look. I wasn’t trying to be cagey. It just came out that way.
Ryan Carson was a junior architect at a high-priced firm that dealt with gigantic corporate clients. His duplex was probably worth a cool half-mil, and the interior looked like a great big Ikea display. Queer.
I snapped on the plastic booties and edged into the master bedroom, mouth-breathing against the smell. The closet had once had mirrored doors, but what remained of them was scattered around the room. I squinted and saw that the shards were set in more of a burst pattern than a swirl this time around, as if the killer couldn’t stand to repeat himself exactly.
Ryan Carson was splayed in the middle, arms and legs outstretched like he was in the midst of winning some Olympic event, naked and triumphant, though starting to bloat in the middle. His eyelids looked wrong. Covering bits of mirror, I guessed.
But where was Ryan Carson’s spirit? I looked around the room and saw nothing but a pair of techs, one snapping photographs and the other taking notes. “Ryan?” I said, quiet, but the techs heard. I’d worked scenes with each of them dozens of times before, but there was still that little pause while they seemed to steel themselves against my presence.
And to make matters worse, Ryan wasn’t talking.
I usually got visuals on murders. The spirits were just so pissed off, they couldn’t wait to tattle on whoever’d done it. Cases where the victim knew the perp were practically open and shut. But there was no visual on Ryan. Or anything else, for that matter. Just a cold dead body on a bed surrounded by mirror fragments.
I headed to Ryan’s kitchen just in case he was hanging out there. On the way, I passed Carolyn and Marks. Carolyn was grilling a witness in a quiet and professional manner, while Marks loomed behind her, looking very big and threatening while he took notes. I had to give it to them, they certainly did have their method down pat.
The kitchen, a landscape of black enamel and stainless steel, was empty.
I cycled through the various rooms, edging around the perimeter and doing my best to fly under everyone else’s radars. The Auracel was ancient history by then, and I should have picked up Ryan about as easily as I could order a pizza. So where was he?
I strained so hard in the living room that I actually got a visual on a dead goldfish. He just floated there above the mantle, looking translucent and bored. If Ryan’s spirit was around, it wasn’t in the living room.
The duplex had an attic—not the finished kind where there’s a guest room and a spot for out-of-season clothes, but the creepy kind where you’ve got to pull a set of fo
lding stairs out of the ceiling to get up there. I’d had no luck anywhere else, so I decided to see if maybe Ryan was haunting the attic.
The feeling up there was calm, though through the vents I could hear people on the street chattering, and the squeak of investigators’ feet treading up and down between the first and second floors drifted up through the trap door. Ryan had a lot of stuff up there, but it was all boxed and labeled. Christmas decorations, camping gear, a bunch of old board games.
I reached out to him with my mind, trying to composite the dead body on the bed with the snapshots stuck to the fridge and come up with a semblance of how the victim had really looked. “Don’t you want us to get this sonofabitch?” I asked aloud. “C’mon, Ryan. Throw me a bone.”
I listened, and I reached. Nothing. I walked farther in, crouching beneath the slope of the roofline and squinting to make out the blocky architect’s writing on the boxes: College. Badminton set. Mom’s House. As my gloved fingers brushed against the final crate, I thought I heard the distant sound of a woman crying. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t have said for sure.
Chapter 6
We reconvened back at the Twelfth Precinct, since Carolyn and Marks were the only two with tangible work to show for our afternoon of digging. Neither of them seemed to think it was unusual that I hadn’t gotten a hit from the crime scene. And I don’t think either of them would’ve hesitated to question me if they had. They were both similar shades of blunt, though Carolyn tended to be so soft-spoken she almost came off as polite.
“So the guy from the newsstand saw Ryan the architect come home with a Chinese guy,” said Marks, “and the cab driver swears the second man was Pakistani. Is that what I’m hearing?”
Carolyn’s gaze went wide, like she was watching a movie screen inside her head. “They were positive, Jacob. Absolutely certain.”
“But given the timeframe,” said Marks, “about twelve thirty p.m., they had to be talking about the same guy.”
I broke in. “Maybe he was just, uh…tanned.” I felt like an idiot the second I opened my mouth, but Carolyn’s answer took the sting off.
PsyCop 1: Among the Living Page 3